Humanoid Robot Football Team for Playing at the Robocoup

ROSSUM 2011
June 27-28, 2011
Xalapa, Ver., Mexico
Humanoid Robot Football Team for Playing at the Robocoup Tournament in the Kid Size Category: Halcones U.V. Patricia González Gaspar, Héctor Gabriel Acosta Mesa Universidad Veracruzana Departamento de Inteligencia Artificial Xalapa, Veracruz, México [email protected] [email protected] The RoboCup is a worldwide event that aims for a Abstr act fully autonomous robot team wins a football match This demo presents the implementation details against humans in 2050. In order to reach this developed to construct the Halcones U.V. objective, a set of real and simulated leagues have humanoid robot team. The team consists of three been created in the last years by RoboCup humanoid robots. Each robot was provided with tournament. three capabilities: basic vision, body stabilization and tilt detection. A pan­tilt electromechanical In México in the late 90’s was held the first system was designed to operate as the robot’s neck. Mexican Robotics Tournament (TMR), which is an The body of the robot is controlled from a micro event with multiple categories. The TMR’s processor located in the camera. Operation of each objective is that students test their knowledge in robot is based on master­slave processor different areas related to robotics. In particular the architecture. The whole robot’s control was Robot humanoid kid size category has as its main implemented as a finite state machine. Each of the objective that robots with a human­like appearance states were defined as actions that the robot must play soccer against each other. perform, such as walking, turning, lifting, or 2. Mater ials and methods kicking. The robot team was tested in the robocup tournament. For the robot to play soccer as a person does it needs to able to locate the ball inside the field, go 1. Intr oduction to him and score a goal. The rolling, visual Robotics is now as it was computer science 30 recognition, kicking the ball are some of the tasks years ago. Therefore, it is natural to think that in 30 that needs to be solved. years there will be a robot in almost every home, in 2.1 Har dware the same way that there is now a computer in every home. In the near future more human resources are Locomotion is performed by the robot Robonova­ going to be needed to develop these applications, 1, showed in the figure 1, which has 16 servo so students should be introduced early to this field motors (actuators), an ATMega 128 processor, in order to encourage them to be part of the MR­C3024 card with ports for up to 24 servo developers needed. motors and special­purpose ports. The robot’s movements were programmed into the software One very important aspect in robotics is that it can RoboBasic. be used for educational purposes, because it is a great way to demonstrate the skills of students in different areas of knowledge. The Educational Robotics (ER) was born in 1987 and its main objectives are:
· Integrate different areas of knowledge
· Appropriation of students of different languages
· Construction and testing of their own methods of knowledge acquisition
· Creating a fun learning environment and heuristic Fig. 2: Sen 00742 Fig. 1: Robonova­1 84
Fig. 3: CMUCam3
ROSSUM 2011
June 27-28, 2011
Xalapa, Ver., Mexico
The results described above can be seen in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQFIXIeYF VI and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mn61YXXc fE&featur e=related.The first video shows a shutter robot that and the second video shows the goalkeeper. 2.2 Tilt and stabilization The tilt and stabilization is controlled by the sensor sen­00741 SparkFun, through some ports card of the robot Robonova­1. This sensor is showed in the figure 2. The values of this sensor are obtained and interpreted by the processor of the robot. 2.3 The vision System The vision system of the robot is based on a camera CMUCam3, showed in the figure 3, which performs image processing. This architecture is able to perform tasks such as image preprocessing and tracking. The tracking task was programmed in C language, using the suit of functions of the cc3 project, provided on the site http://cmucam.org/ Fig. 7: Finite State machine. Four states can me reached by the robots depending on the sensor inputs. 3. Conclusion Educational robotics is an excellent option to introduce student to the challenges faced in this area. The control architecture proposed in this work proved to be competitive to achieve our goals. The implementation of a finite state machine provided a good way to determine under what circumstances the robot will perform certain actions. Eventually, a team of fully autonomous robots playing a soccer match against humans is not just a dream, is an inevitable event. Fig. 5: Tr ack color a ball Fig. 4: Pan­Tilt System Fig. 6: Str uctur al modifications Refer ences 2.4 Pan­tilt electr omechanical system [1] Barrientos A., Peñin, L.F., Balanguer C. and Araceli R. (1997), Fundamentos de Robótica (First edition). España, MacGraw­Hill [2] Jähne B., Haußecker H. (1999), Handbook of computer vision and applications, London, Academic Press. 2.5 Str uctur al modifications [3] Structural modifications of the robots were made as security for vision and pan­tilt systems. (Fig. 6) Stabilizers were added at the foot of the robot for it to keep its center of mass. Ruiz­Velasco Sánchez L. (2007), Educatrónica: Innovación en el aprendizaje de las ciencias y la tecnología (First edition). Spain, Diaz de Santos. [4] Saphiro L. and Stockman G. (2001), Computer vision, E.U.A., Prentice Hall [5] Marchand D. (1991), La Robotique pédagogique! Ça existe?, available in http://www.epi.asso.fr/c_pdf/b65p119.pdf, october 7 2010. [6] Dutot Pierre­François, Complexity of master­slave tasking on heterogéneos trees. European Journal of Operational Research, 2003.
The pan­tilt electromechanical system was constructed using two servomotors (Fig. 4). On this system was mounted the CMUCam3. One of the servomotors of the pan­tilt system controls the verticals movement (tilt) and the other servomotor controls the horizontal movement (pan). 2.6 Contr ol Control was implemented as a master­slave processor architecture, in which the camera’s processor performs the role of scheduler and the robot processor the role of slave. The finite state machine of Fig. 7 shows the possible states the robot can take. The control is performed by the microprocessor located in the camera and commanded by the vision system. 85